Screening Soviet Nationalities: Kulturfilms from the Far North to Central Asia by Oksana Sarkisova (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Screening Soviet Nationalities: Kulturfilms from the Far North to Central Asia by Oksana Sarkisova Camille Neufville (bio) Oksana Sarkisova, Screening Soviet Nationalities: Kulturfilms from the Far North to Central Asia (London: I. B. Tauris, 2017). 299 pp., ill. Filmography. Bibliography. ISBN: 978-1-7845-3573-5. Oksana Sarkisova's first monograph, originally published in 2017 and reissued in paperback in 2021 by Bloomsbury, investigates the way early Soviet documentary cinema represented and imagined national communities within the new Soviet Union, both on- and off-screen. This genre of documentaries was known by its German name "Kulturfilm." An experienced researcher in the dynamic field of visual studies, a fellow of the Blinken Open Society Archives in Budapest, and a keen organizer of events related to documentary filming such as the Verzió International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival, Sarkisova aptly brings together the theorist's critical, discerning gaze and an attention to the technical and administrative minutiae of any cinematic enterprise. The result is a rich and pleasurable book, both acute in its analysis of particular films and ample in scope. Conceptually anchored at the crossroads of cultural history, film studies, postcolonial theory, and critical science studies, Screening Soviet Nationalities tackles the issue of visibility as a power tool. Specifically, it focuses on the construction of otherness and its dynamic relationship with the early Soviet modernization project. In so doing, it draws inspiration from a wide array of theoretical works, ranging from Martin Jay's exploration of "scopic regimes" in modern Europe to state-of-the-art studies of visuality in Russian and Soviet contexts.1 Sarkisova posits a mutual and dynamic relationship between cinema and the appropriation of space, through visualizing techniques of dominance that were transferred from the geo-military to the cinematographic sphere, such as mapping and aerial shots (Pp. 47–52). The Empire's New Frames The persistence of a colonial, imperial Russian imagery in Soviet Kulturfilms, despite their authors' explicit desire to break with the visual tropes maintained by their predecessors, constitutes a central arc in Sarkisova's book. Screening [End Page 213] Soviet Nationalities is divided into seven chapters. The introduction situates Sarkisova's approach as one grounded not only in Soviet film studies but also in the history of Soviet cultural institutions and Soviet nationality policy. While introducing the reader to her corpus of more than 120 "non-fiction" films shot during expeditions to distant Soviet peripheries between 1926 and 1940, Sarkisova makes the case that these films served as a medium for the creation of "emerging visual conventions of filming Soviet diversity and unity" (P. 14). Chapter 1 discusses the generic hybridity of the category of "Kulturfilm" and the debates within Soviet film studios and cultural-political institutions regarding the most appropriate designation of this genre: "documentary"? "non-fiction (literally 'unplayed') [neigrovoi] film"? (P. 2). Chapter 2 focuses on Dziga Vertov's A Sixth Part of the World (1926) as exemplifying "cine-race" (kino-probeg) as a new filmic form fit for rendering the groundbreaking achievements of the young Soviet society. It should be mentioned that the book's Epilogue is also centered on a Vertovian project, although not eventually directed by Vertov himself, Day of the New World(1940). In so doing, the book aptly comes full circle in unearthing the ambiguities of the modernist dream of a total, all-encompassing "cine-atlas," which ends up in the celebration, in Day of the New World, of an integrative, if hierarchical Soviet unity. Chapters 3 and 4 both deal with liminal spaces that were literally "at the edge" of the Soviet world – the Far North and the Far East – and were represented in films as a battleground for the Bolsheviks' modernization project. Chapter 5 dwells on the relationship between hygienic themes and ethnical categorization in expedition films, demonstrating how health issues encapsulated the tension between the acceptance of ethnic particularisms and the promotion of a uniform, modern, universalist lifestyle. Chapters 6 and 7 revert to a geographical principle. Chapter 6 explores the evolution of filmic representations of the Caucasus, from a romantic locus of anti-imperial resistance to the Soviet primary tourism destination. Chapter 7 discusses the vicissitudes...